Kurt Goldstein's life spanned the whole history of modern psychology. He was born the year before Wundt's official founding of experimental psychology at Leipzig, and only three years after the informal establishment of the first psychologicallaboratory at the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard under William J ames' aegis. He was nine years old when Fechner died, sixteen at Helmholtz' death. He was a student at the Breslau Gymnasium while plans were made in G. Stanley Hall's study at Clark University for the establishment of the American Psychological Association, whose seventy-fifth anniversary is being celebrated this year. Kurt Goldstein's interests, however, spanned far more than psychology. They encompassed all of human endeavor. His earliest inclinations were towards Iiterature and philosophy. When he turned to the study of medicine it was an exchange of a life of contemplation for one of active participation in human affairs, and he envisaged a career of helping human beings in distress. He began by studying the basic substrates of human behavior, and his first publications concern problems of neuroembryology and comparative anatomy. There followed a decade of "fact finding" during which he ranged from anatomy through neurology, psychology and psychiatry, addressing hirnself to many different disturbances of behavior and the distress they bring in their wake.
A period of consolidation followed when, soon after the outbreak of the First World War, he was called on to organize and direct the Institut zur Erforschung der Folgeerscheinungen von Hirnverletzungen at Frankfurt. N ow he was responsible for the whole human being of the brain-injured soldiers who came to the institute for treatment and rehabilitation. The very comprehensiveness of the task demanded-and thus created-what came to be formulated much later as the holistic view of the organism. The patients had to be helped to come to terms with the new conditions confronting them, to actualize themselves within the Iimits imposed by their handicaps, to achieve maximum adequacy vis-a-vis the world. Significant aid in this endeavor depended on the fullest possible understanding of the deficits and alterations wrought by brain injury, and such an understanding could be gained only through intensive analysis of the patients' performances. As the result there began to appear the long series of studies that were to become classics: on sensory and motor deficits consequent to circumscribed cortical lesions; on perception and perceptual alterations;
V vi FOREWORD on tonus and tonus disturbances; and, finally, on language and aphasia whose discussion necessitated a reconsideration of all the so-called higher mental processes.
All along Goldstein had been interested in psychiatric questions, and during the late nineteen-twenties he entered actively into the discussions of the new dynamic psychiatry that had developed in the interim. His first formal statements concerning the holistic approach to biology were made in this context, though its detailed formulation had to await the enforced Ieisure of exile.
When Goldstein arrived in the United States he was in his mid-fifties; barely spoke the language of the country, with a spectacular career behind him and a recently published magnum opus that was not yet available in English. His American colleagues welcomed him with great personal warmth, but his professional and scientific future was uncertain. Y et there wastobe a second thirty years' career during which he exerted a major influence on students of neurology, psychiatry and psychology, and on scholars in many other fields. During his last years he returned to his first love--phtlosophy, literature, and, even if only in passing, problems of aesthetics. And so his intellectuallife had come full circle. Though he saw his work as unfinished, he left to us an achievement of rare inner coherence and completion.
The contributors to the present volume represent part of the reach of mind that was Goldstein's, and their initial contact with him dates from different periods of his life and work. They are listed herein alphabetical order.
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